I didn't write much about START last week because the Senate debate on the subject has been painfully stupid. Republican Senators eager to deal the administration a political defeat have settled on complaining that the preamble to the treaty limits U.S. missile defense even though the preamble is nonbinding. But since the vote on ratifying the treaty may take place today, I write at Greg's place that ratification shouldn't be controversial:
What makes this absurd is that the senators leading the resistance -- Arizona Republicans John McCain and Jon Kyl -- have made it very clear that they understand the preamble language the amendments would replace is not legally binding. Every living Republican Secretary of State has endorsed New START, and the treaty has the blessing of the current military leadership, including the director of the Missile Defense Agency, who, as Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) noted yesterday, said that "there is no restraint, zero, none, no restraint whatsoever on our missile defense capacity."
Now either the GOP senators opposed to START know something the rest of the country doesn't, and the entire U.S. military and bipartisan foreign policy apparatus is conspiring to sell U.S. national security out to Russia, or Republicans in the Senate have reached a new low in their efforts to humiliate the president.
The answer seems obvious, doesn't it?
